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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Dell President Weighs in on Enterprise Clientele, Focus on Cloud Analytics

Steve Felice, Dell’s president and chief commercial enterprise, stopped by theCube during his company’s conference earlier this month to discuss the key aspects of his business: client trends, technology and services.

He starts out with the former: customers want simplicity, and Dell is more than happy to deliver. Felice says that the focus here is data, and how the cloud can be used to tap into it, and adds that Dell offers solutions for remote backup, desktop virtualization and holistic data center monitoring. He credits the latter product to a combination of technologies that his firm gained through recent acquisitions.

He goes on to elaborate on the connection between the cloud and big data, explaining that every time a new technology emerges, there is a spike in demand for hardware to power a growing number of use cases. Today, the top use case is analytics – companies need a lot of compute, storage and networking equipment to crunch through their data, and they’re turning to vendors like Dell for the necessary infrastructure solutions.

On that note, Felice says that Dell about 65,000 unit shipments away from becoming the largest provider of servers worldwide, and that it’s already number one in the U.S. and Asia.

After briefly addressing Windows 8 and praising its touch interface, the executive moves on to talk a bit about the Services element in Dell’s business. He says that 20,000 sales representatives interact with customers every day, a statistic that contributed a great deal to the tremendous growth seen by Kace after it merged with Dell in 2010.

Throughout the interview, Felice touches on a number of other topics. He mentions the fact Dell is not held back by a faltering mainframe, which cannot be said for many of its peers, and offers more details into his company’s internal M&A process. Check out the video for the full scoop, and see our entire Dell World 2012 Playlist here.

About Maria Deutscher

Maria Deutscher is a staff writer for SiliconANGLE covering all things enterprise and fresh. Her work takes her from the bowels of the corporate network up to the great free ranges of the open-source ecosystem and back on a daily basis, with the occasional pit stop in the world of end-users. She is especially passionate about cloud computing and data analytics, although she also has a soft spot for stories that diverge from the beaten track to provide a more unique perspective on the complexities of the industry.